Autocar
Mercedes makes some big claims about range and charging for its new mid-sized electric estate The very latest new electric cars have a surefire way of making nearly new ones age so much quicker than their petrol-powered antecedents ever used to. The electric Mercedes-Benz CLA certainly felt like the future, about five minutes ago. It was announced in spring 2025. It remains the reigning European Car of the Year. It has the kind of performance, range and efficiency that was considered good enough, back then, to be class-leading.And now? The BMW i3’s the new flavour of the month, taking claimed range beyond 550 miles WLTP. Mercedes meanwhile has to look to some added variety to keep the custom rolling in. Which is why it has been trickling in some new variants, such as a Shooting Brake estate derivative and a faster, dual-motor 350 4Matic version.The arrivals of these derivatives is part of the usual fleshing out of the model range. There will be a 58kWh CLA 200 joining the party this summer as well, offering a range of as much as 321 miles in Shooting Brake form and priced from a whisker over £40,000.This, then, is one of the longest-range EVs on sale in the UK – and it’s not the brand’s top-dollar technology flagship but the entry-level saloon. The CLA achieves this not with some next-generation battery but with a combination of the fairly traditional engineering that Mercedes has long been known for – gearboxes and aerodynamics – and the electric motor expertise that it has gathered over the past few years of volume EV making.The CLA proved a match for the Tesla Model 3 in a recent group test, even if it couldn’t quite beat it; now to see how it fares in our range of instrumented tests.
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